Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

I feel like at this point he's just an American Ted Hughes, a figure of dwindling prestige that people more easily remember the gossipy unflattering stuff about

So are you guys telling me I should or shouldn't bother to read the Ivana Lowell memoir I eventually bought after seeing it for months if not years near the checkout counter at the old RIzzoli Bookstore flagship on 57th Sttreet?

I would read it if it appeals to you

Chinaski otm about some of the anger coming from being a poet, finding the Lowell's work to be largely trash, and being totally confused by the ongoing attention paid to him and his work. It's worth noting, too, that I don't know a single poet who will stand up for Lowell besides a few poems, if that.

Another thing that concerns me about his prominence is that it reinforces the idea that poetry is largely dead. Obviously that isn't true, so why do mainstream critics and publishers pretend it to be so? I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review, but I'm also tired of hearing about this one motherfucker when I know there are so many others whose work is amazing but remains hopelessly lost in frightfully expensive original editions. Only a year or two ago did John Wieners get a selected, for example, and he's considered one of the great queer poets of the past 100 years. Full editions of his most important books go for $150-- that's a shame. Instead, we get another book of Lowell's farts to Hardwick or whiny letters to Bishop.

I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review

ooh -- my uni library's got Wieners' 1986 collection.

Any book with a spine is too structurally unadventurous to be called experimental IMO.

I'm very late to this but the idea of experimental writing seems very anachronistic and quaint to me

That’s how I feel about washing cast iron pans with oven cleaner tbh

fuck washing a book

classic

Why not?

I think the intention was that he'd be satisfied with a lesser level of prominence than a big up in the Times, rather than that such a thing was anathema.

Exactly, thanks Aimless.

I'm very late to this but the idea of experimental writing seems very anachronistic and quaint to me

― plax (ico), Friday, February 18, 2022 12:07 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

What other adjective would you propose, or do you mean the idea of writing that is experimenting with language is anachronistic and quaint?

Actually, forget it, I need to take a break from this site I think.

Take a break if you need one, but please free to come back when you are ready.

Why not?

I think the intention was that he'd be satisfied with a lesser level of prominence than a big up in the Times, rather than that such a thing was anathema.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 18 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Exactly, thanks Aimless.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Friday, 18 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

This is absurd.

Why is that?

Or, more clearly, in what way?

What I'm reading here is a fantasy of an intention that this recently deceased poet might have had, that he'd want to remain obscure (or even just like a cult figure), because you are precious about his work and you wouldn't want those people (libs, say) to touch it and yet bore on and on about Ted Hughes/Lowell being prominent and that those people don't know better.

I'd like a better class of snobbery here.

Reading slightly wrong but still the desire to keep poets/writing away from people because well who knows, they might like this, but not in the right way, seems to be the fear.

I sent tables my regrets for posting just as I did...
Got John D.'s new Devil House at library this evening.

Non-ubiquity, in and of itself, is no more profound than ubiquity. Less so if anything because at least ubiquity has the kind of profundity that comes from shared experience (see Ewing, T; “Come On Eileen”, 2009).

Love this !!!

(But surely it was more like 2001?)

I finished Adam Mars-Jones' long article about disability. He's shrewd and eloquent. Some of the ideas discussed are compelling and challenging. I get the sense that AMJ didn't previously have a special interest in the subject, but developed one after this. He's good at thinking about the relations between disability and other identities that have been the basis of identity politics.

Actually I sense that things have moved on since then (1996) and disability *is* now a bit more established as a significant form of discrimination, alongside eg: race and gender, than it was when AMJ wrote this.

The title of AMJ's collection is BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS. I'd never known where that phrase comes from. I now see from one essay that it's a paraphrase of his mother's name (ie: those words were the 'meanings' of her names).

I also returned to Gerry Smyth's DECOLONISATION AND CRITICISM (1998) and Graham / Kirkland's IRELAND AND CULTURAL THEORY (1999), as well as the perpetual standby Kiberd's INVENTING IRELAND (1995).

You’re right, PF, my swift google picked up the slightly shortened re-write that formed part of Tom’s Popular project.

xyzz I don't think that's what's being said at all, table's point is it would be great if this poet got written up in the Times but that's clearly not going to happen so he'd be fine with a lesser level of prominence instead of the relative obscurity he's in.

"I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review" is the direct quote. No "it would be great if the chumps at NYT got this".

well, I guess it's the words of a living author, so I'll let table say which one it is, unless he's quit ilx

White Feminism KOa Beck
Book by hawaiian lesbian author on the problems with various focuses of traditional feminism and what it has excluded in terms of non-white women. Also in the way that it has put forward teh single individual heroine as model for activity rather tahn showing that the way things work relies on collectivity.
Quite enjoying it. may need to reread so may need my own copy instead of this being an interlibrary loan.
I have been looking through the irish library system and ordering things i find interesting which may be a bit counterproductive since it has meant i have several books on the go and more deadline than I should have given myself. Plus I'm not paying attention to the books I've picked up in charity shops. Have to find a better system for doing this. Have been flying through books at speed and buying a lot of very interesting looking things. Still looking for others. Think I'm already on like 28 books finished this year.

Emma Dabiri Don't Touch My Hair
Half Irish author talks about black hair in her own personal history and in general. Which leads on to a number of other connected issues.
I'm enjoying the writing. Hope she writes more.
THink she may be regularly in some newspaper which I need to look out for.

Carl Sagan Demon Haunted World
astronomer's book on scientific illiteracy and general credulity.
Good read, may have some issues that need to be clarified and is 25 years old now . But a good starting point for further research/investigation. shame it is still as topical as it was when it was published though still not as up to date as a more recent book would hopefully be. I need to read Great Popular Delusions since i have at least one copy lying around. Think that may overlap with this to some degree but is much older.

Xyzzz, Melnick quit writing in the 80s after writing a long poem on the AIDS crisis and becoming absorbed in his job as a copyeditor at the SF Chronicle. He purposefully dropped off the map, and in the only interview he gave, he seems pretty content with his decision.

It's probably best for you to shut up when you don't know what you're talking about.

That’s never stopped him before.

Remember that not everyone longs to be in the limelight, or to have their work read by everyone.

Which is why the point about ubiquity still stands for me. The idea that collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows, is an absolutely ridiculous one. I'll argue that to the end.

You bring up that the media only writes about Lowell but you just want things you find good to remain obscure and then lash out when people apparently don't know what you're talking about, or people don't know the names of these poets. It's just incoherent rubbish.

Lock yourself in a room with trashy SF and cheap crime paperbacks for a year to get these banal notions out of you head, table

That’s never stopped him before.

― Solaris Ocean Blue (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

As for you, put up a witty YouTube link, that's all you're good for.

Fellas… this is the wayr room

lol!

I'm not going to waste more time responding to blatant projection and mischaracterization.

Today, my plan is to do one final read-through of Cooper's 'I Wished' to get some pull quotes for the review I'm working on.

Currently reading Clark Coolidge's 'To the Cold Heart' before bed, and Gail Scott's 'Permanent Revolution' with coffee in the morning. The latter is disappointing when compared to her novels-- there's something about her style that doesn't work well for me in the essay form, but is extremely provocative in her novels. It might be her approach to disjunction...trying to put my finger on it.

I like Clark Coolidge fine. Is that what you meant by experimental? He seems to me to write in a high Modernist style which I find enjoyable and interesting but very much anchored to early 20th C aesthetics.

'experimental' i think invokes at this point a set of strategies to unsettle preconceptions of how writing makes sense (i.e. 'anti-' gestures that interrupt legibility in various ways) tied to avant garde ideals of progress and novelty. The idea that these kinds of approaches continue to lead an aesthetic vanguard I think is fairly outmoded even within this very limited bourgeois construction of modernity. This is also true in the more straightforward sense that these traditions, regardless of the popularity of individual poets, are now similarly sanctified by just as many stuffy cultural institutions.

From this point of view I agree that the positioning of certain kinds of works as 'experimental' is useful to claim and repudiate certain kinds of capital and prestige for works/authors but I can't see that it has any utility that I would find particularly productive or interesting.

Good post, plax.

I'd argue against that categorization of Coolidge, if only because the guy has written so many books that simply saying he writes in High Modernist tradition is doing the breadth of his work a great disservice.

I don't really agree with the rest of your post because the experiment that you call 'outmoded' continues to be so stridently rejected by institutions that many of the finest poets of our time are lucky to sell 100 copies of their latest books, but I'm also not sure what sort of stuffy institutions you're speaking of.

There's also much beyond the ease of avant-garde ideals of progress and novelty...maybe it's just me, but I actually think some people are interested in playing with and unsettling language not because of any unconsciously absorbed bourgeois desire for progress, but because that is what interests them. I don't think anything I write is progressing anything, but I do it because it allows me to think and feel in a way that feels most like myself. If other people like it, fine. If not, fine.

I do wonder what you'd consider an aesthetic vanguard these days, but this isn't the thread for it.

I will also admit that one of the reasons I get worked up about this stuff is that I am consistently called an 'experimental' poet, and many of my best friends are also categorized in this way, so when all the work we've done is dismissed as mere bourgeois trappings, I get defensive. Seems like punching down.

"I'm not going to waste more time responding to blatant projection and mischaracterization."

If you don't like your own words thrown back at you be more precise.

This table is broken.

"I don't really agree with the rest of your post because the experiment that you call 'outmoded' continues to be so stridently rejected by institutions that many of the finest poets of our time are lucky to sell 100 copies"

As if you are interested if it sells more. Comforting that it doesn't, huh?

If other people like it, fine. If not, fine....all the work we've done is dismissed as mere bourgeois trappings...Seems like punching down.

These two attitudes would appear to be at war with one another. Not that this is wrong or bad. We all struggle to reconcile conflicting ideas and feelings. Absolute consistency of judgement is not a sign of infallibility so much as lack of self-knowledge.

1. I think its fine for a general characterisation of a writer to not take in and reflect the full breadth of their work. This is the nature of general characterisations. So I do not retract this characterisation which I think was broadly accurate and I would be surprised if Cooldidge himself would take any umbridge at it. I would hope that any authors work would at least aspire to something not entirely identical with these categorisations.

2. I think the legacies of early 20th Century Modernism that I suggested in my previous post do enjoy high cultural prestige and are very much celebrated by conservative cultural institutions such as museums or music venues and in the specific instance of Coolidge I recall buying a very handsome copy of one of his books in the LRB bookshop a few years ago, probably on the shelf between Anne Carson and Emily Dickinson. He was not selling it photocopied out of the back of his car. It's certainly true that Cooldidge and his contemporaries hold far more prestige than other kinds of writing, say romance novels marketed to women or detective novels. Its also worth remembering that writers with all kinds of ambitions remain obscure regardless of how palatable their work might be to different audiences. Amazon is full of self-published books by writers working in the aforementioned genres as well as others others.

3. Regarding your assertion that some may be interested in playing with unsettling language because it interests them, I don't disagree. I would have assumed that some combination of this and a need to pay rent is why most people who do most things do thos things. This is also why people write romance or detective novels, watch TV or learn to bake sourdough bread. What psychic drives guide these interests is not really for me to say.

4. I thought in my post I was quite clear that the ideal of an aesthetic vanguard doesn't interest me all that much, but if it wasn't clear then I'm happy to clarify that this is the case.

5. I will end by saying that I was not in any way responding to you or your friends poetry, neither of which I have read. I cannot speak to the motives of anyone who has called it 'experimental' but rest assured that they and I are not conspiring in any way. I was only responding to the posts you have made in this thread. My characterisation of the ideal of an Avant-garde as being fundamentally bourgeois was simply my argument and opinion about a very large and important movement of aesthetic practices since the late 19th Century and was certainly not directed at you. And, as I am not myself Robert Lowell, I don't think this could be thought of as 'punching down' even if you want to think of it as punching at all, which I don't. I do note however, that nobody in this thread seems remotely exercised about the kinds of prestige afforded or withheld by cultural institutions in the way you are.

The idea that collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows, is an absolutely ridiculous one.

Who has proposed this idea?

The only person who just about slightly has is Tim, in response to an earlier claim that people had proposed this idea.

I actually thought of exactly the same thing as Tim (ie: the one person who HAS claimed that ubiquity is great is Tom Ewing), and greatly enjoyed his reference.